The new German surveillance state - Merkel, Snowden and the Euro Hawk drone

In principle, Germany is a state committed to democracy and international peace. This is why three recent political scandals, which exposed the vulnerability of German citizens to the surveillance institutions of their state as well as the development of drones, came as a surprise to many.

A demonstration against PRISM in Berlin. Wikimedia Commons/Mike Herbst. Some rights reserved.

A demonstration against PRISM in Berlin. Wikimedia Commons/Mike Herbst. Some rights reserved.

In the summer of
2013, three scandals have shone a new spotlight on the role of the German state in both domestic and
international surveillance. The first was the case of the American National
Security Agency (NSA) spying on the mobile phones of millions of German
citizens. The NSA spying scandal exposed the messy state of Germany’s domestic
security/privacy issues. The second summer debacle - the Euro Hawk drone
scandal - revolved around the use of surveillance technology to ensure the
external security of the German state. The third scandal took place in the fall - revelations about the spying of Merkel’s personal mobile phone brought
once again the issues of security, consent and dignity to the forefront of public discussion.

Yet, while the breaches of individual privacy and personal consent
as a result of unauthorized and non-consensual mass surveillance generated a very strong public response, the surveillance drone debacle has now quietly left the newspapers’
front pages. As we shall see, this is revealing of
differing German attitudes towards the surveillance state.

The scandals are
all the more disquieting because they have uncovered that underneath the calm
surface of Germany’s economic prosperity, there are deep and worrying
fractures. Mapping these fractures requires reflecting on what each of these
scandals has revealed about the relations between the state and its citizens. Each of these security misconducts has also underlined a new form of social control, unmasking different facets of a new global phenomenon – the emerging surveillance state.

Domestic surveillance – from Big Brother to Big Data

Two recent domestic
surveillance scandals lifted the curtain on the making of Germany’s
surveillance state. October 2013 marked the onset of the most recent scandal,
with news of the US surveillance of Chancellor Merkel’s mobile phone hitting
the front pages. The issue was further aggravated by the fact that not only
calls concerning the affairs of the state, but also personal calls of
Chancellor Merkel had been intercepted for months. The scandal caused public uproar,
a special Bundestag session, and the launch of a parliamentary inquiry. The US
Ambassador to Germany was summoned by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs
for an explanation, and observers duly noted that it was the first time this had happened since the end of World War II. Fresh evidence of
surveillance/security misconduct also fanned public criticism of the
authorities, which were accused of having all too quickly closed down the summer NSA spying case. Many
felt duped and outraged by what was now perceived as excessive haste in hushing down a rising scandal.

In the summer of 2013 the NSA spying scandal
erupted as a result of revelations that Germany has been playing a central role
in the NSA's global surveillance network. The events snowballed in early June,
as Edward Snowden leaked the first classified documents. Snowden‘s leak revealed
that millions of communication messages from Germany had been accessed by the
NSA’s Global Informant programme. Such revelations showed ‘the possibility of
the absolute surveillance of a country's people and foreign citizens without
any kind of effective controls or supervision,’ as Der Spiegelpointed
out.

Wide-spread public criticism was aimed at the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the German intelligence agency, when
it was revealed that it had collaborated with the NSA and GCHQ by sending them millions of pieces of metadata every month. The possibility that mobile phone
information sent to the NSA was later used to conduct drone attacks in the
Pakistani region of Waziristan in October 2010 led to even more public concern.
Der Spiegel also revealed that the NSA
maintains a cryptology center in Griesheim, near the city of Darmstadt; the
center is, in the NSA’s own words – ‘the largest intelligence analysis and
production unit in Europe.’ As Der
Spiegelpointed
out, ‘the NSA also reportedly has operations at the Mangfall military base,
in the Bavarian town of Bad Aibling, and in Wiesbaden, in the central German
state of Hesse. Yet the German government allegedly knows nothing about any of
this’.

So much for the
domestic security scandal. But the eventful summer of 2013 also set the scene for
another scandal, this time about Germany’s external defence capabilities - the
troubled procurement of the Euro Hawk surveillance drone.

Distant deaths - the rise and fall of the Euro Hawk
surveillance drone

Mention of ‘drones’ evokes American military campaigns, rather than the dusty ministerial offices of the
German capital. Yet, reports on the rise and fall of a German surveillance drone caught the avid attention of the German and European publics. The public learnt with astonishment that for 13
years Germany had a surveillance drone programme going on – resulting in little
accountability even if the drone’s flying problems were universally
acknowledged.

Back in 2001, during Chancellor
Schroeder’s time, members of the Social Democrat-Green Party coalition
government put their heads (and money) together to develop
the Euro Hawk, a variant of the US-developed Global Hawk, a spy drone, built
by the American company Northrop Grumman. The result of the cooperation between
Northrop Grumman and Europe’s EADS, the Euro Hawk was supposed to enhance the
surveillance capabilities of the German military and support NATO’s Alliance Ground
Surveillance system. But the project was quickly abandoned.

In 2004, the
Bundeswehr flexed its military and monetary muscle, and asked EADS and Northrop
Grumman to come up with an offer for the development, production, and delivery
of a Euro Hawk. In the following year EADS and Northrop Grumman founded a
dedicated venture, 'Euro Hawk GmbH.' The two founders presented their bid in
December of the same year, although there was little public communication about
the project. In 2007, with the conservative government of chancellor Angela
Merkel in office, the contracts were signed. Two years later German military
inspectors voiced concerns about potential flight permit issues. However, following
pressure from Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg's Defense Ministry, a military inspector
eventually carried
out the necessary tests to enable the provision of temporary flight permission.

The Euro Hawk zipped
across the Atlantic in a 22 hour trip from USA to Germany in 2011. When it was
brought back to Europe, however, the German Defence Ministry under
then-minister Thomas de Maizière ‘discovered’ that permanent flight permits
would cost an additional 500 to 600 million euros. The end of the Euro Hawk
saga came in 2012, when de Maizière stopped the drone project, because of very
significant problems in obtaining flight permits for European airspace. The
Defence Ministry confirmed its decision to suddenly halt the Euro Hawk programme - a very
costly decision.

But the story doesn't
stop there. This series of scandals highlighted important issues with regards
to relations between the citizens and the state. The first set of issues,
which surfaced in reaction to the misconduct of public officials,
concerns the link between government transparency and legitimacy. The second
set of inter-related issues concerns the 'security, consent, dignity dilemma', that is characteristic of the relations between the citizens and the state.

Government legitimacy and missing accountability

Government
transparency is essential for the legitimacy of a democratic state. Yet the
opaque character of public officials and their misconduct under investigation
raised additional concerns – both about their lack of competence and their limited accountability to the public.

In the case of the
NSA-spying scandal, the then-chancellery minister Ronald Pofalla was called
before a Bundestag committee, wherein he referred to the solemn statements of
the US and British intelligence agencies that no laws had been breached. Pofalla
next added that the BND and the NSA had agreed on pursuing a brand-new "no-spy
pact." The public was quick to rumble the fact that the sudden establishment of such a
no-spying agreement implied that espionage has
been allowed up to now. Yet, Pofalla managed to prevent any more exposure on the issue - the Chancellery chief declined to take any questions and exited
without saying anything else. The true extent of US data surveillance has
remained unclear and hardly any of the allegations have been credibly refuted. The
haughty attitude sported by Pofalla subjected him to wide-spread public scorn
and ridicule, but incurred no official reprimands.

As for the ‘Euro Hawk
debacle’ the German Bundestag launched a formal
inquiry in June, and Defence Minister de Maizière was asked to justify his actions. Yet at the formal Bundestag hearings the Minister repeatedly made false statements
about a key question. Thus he bid farewell not only to the Euro Hawk programme,
but also to his reputation for being a capable and unpartisan bureaucrat. Calls
for de Maizière’s resignation were
made, but he managed to cling to his post until the September elections.

In both cases
powerful public servants seemingly forgot overnight that their first duty is to act at the
service of the public, in its best interest; even more - they eluded
accountability for their actions. Government transparency would have ensured at
least some democratic oversight on the powerful surveillance institutions. Achieving such
democratic oversight is a considerable challenge, and one that raises the
old questions about the role of representative governance and the relations
between the citizen and the state.

The ‘security, consent, dignity’ dilemma

The prime target of surveillance
both domestic and extra-territorial is the citizen. If you are concerned with
state surveillance, it shouldn't make a difference if a German citizen is spied
on by his own government, or if a Pakistani is followed around – and maybe even
killed - by a German drone. However, the public reaction to the NSA spying
scandal and to the Euro Hawk scandal has been different. Throughout
Germany, thousands of citizens took to the streets to protest against NSA
spying. The Euro Hawk programme, with its huge costs and shady procurement
procedures, also caused public outrage. Yet in that case the thousands of citizens did not take to
the streets. Why not?

It is important to mention that while the costs of the drone procurement
have been well publicized in an ‘every penny counts’ manner, initiatives such
as the ‘Name
the Dead’ campaign of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism
have not been able to claim the media spotlight to present a more humanitarian
argument. The
‘Name the Dead’
project records the names of people reportedly killed by CIA drone strikes in
Pakistan. In
the words of Hamit
Dardagan, co-director of the Every Casualty campaign: ‘Casualty
recording is a way of recognising the humanity of people who have been killed,
and making not just their death but also the manner of their death part of the
public record – which is important if one is to prevent these kinds of deaths happening
again’. In matters of national defence every penny clearly counts, but does not every person count as well?

Could this then explain why the denial of
citizen privacy was seen as more against the principles of the German state
than the surveillance
drone acquisition debacle? Judging by the public reaction,
‘being watched’ takes precedence over concern about ‘watching the others’
without the others’ permission. But as Jens Jansen warns,
‘Today the Bundeswehr fights in six theatres of conflict and
our armories come third in our global exports. "Shut up, that secures jobs." But only if you're young enough or stupid enough to forget the
lessons of past wars and corpses’.

It is also
interesting that the public and media did not consider the primarily domestic
‘NSA Spying scandal’ and the external security-related Euro Hawk scandals as
two issues that were linked. The questionable actions of the German political
establishment also did not translate into a penalty vote at the polls, and neither did
they incite some lasting
new forms of political mobilization. The apparently
unaccountable officials raised public ire, but the CDU/CSU got the lion’s share
of the vote in the last election, mostly thanks to Germany’s successful
economic performance.

These recent scandals
have revealed how defenceless citizens - even those as powerful as Chancellor
Merkel - can be in their relations with the institutions tasked with public
protection. In the socio-political nexus of 'security, consent and dignity' of
the modern states, the preoccupation has often been public security, rather
than the citizens’ dignity. However, citizens' consent is the vital and
essential linkage between the two, a connection that must never be broken,
because without human dignity the surveillance state would be left with nothing
to protect. The fight for consent is perhaps the start of a wider movement
against state surveillance which will have, the way things are heading, to be truly
global.

About the author

Tina Schivatcheva is a University of Cambridge graduate and a specialist in international development. Her work includes extensive empirical research conducted throughout Europe as well as in Canada.

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